IdeaAn interactive app based on The Little Prince book. The app covers the chapters in which the prince travel through seven planets before coming to the Earth.

Precedents
The project draws inspiration from interactive children’s books. Particularly the ones by Bruno Munari, which explores the interaction with paper in non-traditional forms.
The purpose then was to make something analogous using a laptop. How can a user interact with it besides using mouse and keyboard?

Technology
The project uses 3 different inputs: camera, light sensor and speaker. Each planet respond for only one of them — except for the first one, which is supposed to be a tutorial for the other parts.

Prototypes
This was my last prototype before the final version. All interactions and navigation working. Drawings still in sketch version — though the final is a sort of sketch, too!

PrecedentsChristopher Niemann’s app “Petty Zoo” is pretty close to the interactions and animations I’m planning. In each scene the user interaction triggers different animations:

Picture by Christopher Niemann

As for the drawing style, it will look more like this John Porcellino gif:

Main Interaction
This is my 2nd prototype for the Code for Art finals. I’ve changed the idea a little bit. The user will no longer play with all the 3 inputs (sound, light and camera) in the same scene. Instead, I’ll have 7 different planets from the Little Prince book. In each one, the user will play with a single input, as in the table below:

The first scene/planet will respond to all 3 inputs because it will also work as an introductory tutorial.

Navigation
I decided to keep the navigation as a separate input, using keyboard. I think that it needs to be something more stable and less exploratory — and also clearly separate from the animation interactions.

ScenesThese are my sketches for the scenes so far. The next step is to integrate them with the coding from the previous prototype.

IdeaAn interactive animation that responds to non-conventional user input.
Talking about his Face Tracker in an interview, Kyle McDonald pointed out that:
“…as far as a practical applications, I could imagine it augmenting the way the computer understands us. I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. Your computer has a microphone to listen to you, an accelerometer to know when you drop it, a camera to watch you, an ambient light sensor to know how bright the screen should be. I have to wonder if it makes sense to respond to our pose and facial expressions.”
Though I’m not using face tracking, this paragraph sums up my inspiration for the project.
My aim is to explore those different inputs as much as possible, using an interactive animation as a basis for that.

Technology
I will use 3 different inputs from hardware available on my macbook: ambient light sensor, mic and camera.
See previous proposal for more details.

Input Checking

The circle position changes according to the average optical flow inside the central grid.
The circle brightness responds to the ambient light; the size, to the sound input volume.

1st Prototype

I want the inputs to have an intuitive connection to the elements:
– the brightness changes the daylight (sun/moon);
– the sound has a wind effect;
– the user movement rotates the planet.
Now that the technology is working, I’ll add more elements to the animation. The interaction between elements will trigger different events — two touching clouds may cause lightnings, clouds over roses may rain etc.

Code for the input checking example here.
Code for the first prototype here.
You’ll also need two add-ons to run the code: ofxOpenCV (already included in the oF add-ons folder) and ofxOpticalFlowBarneback.

A “Little Prince”-like world: The user can interact with it in different ways.
1 – Moving the head rotates the planet; — Facetracker?
2 – Blowing moves the clouds and other floating elements — sound capture?

Noisy JellyMarianne Cauvard & Raphaël PluvinageJellies with different shapes and salt concentration are placed over a capacitive sensor board. The electric current changes according to those factors and the distance and strength of the user contact. The resulting current is transformed in an audio output.

ARCubeNatalia RojasA Rubick’s Cube that serves as an interface to navigate through a product catalog. The user can rotate the 3D models by physically rotating the cube — probably equipped with an accelerometer. Shuffling the cube triggers the navigation and loads different products.

IdeaA simulation in which blue triangles chase pink circles. When touched by the blue triangles, the pink circles turn grey, “deactivated.” Pink circles have the power to turn the grey ones back into pink, and thus the circles are able to resist the triangles’ influence. The result is a system in which the balance between the two elements constantly shifts, without reaching a particular end.

ContextIn her website aimed to talk about contemporary femininity, the journalist Juliana de Faria recently launched a campaign against sexual harassment.This topic has been largely discussed in Brazil and her campaign helped spread out the debate. As part of the campaign, the journalist Karin Hueck conducted a survey with 7762 women. The results show alarmingly numbers. For instance, 99,6% of the women said that they have been sexually harassed at least once.Moving to New York, me and Laura have been facing lots of cultural changes. As we’ve been here for only 3 months, it’s hard to reach any conclusion on a complex subject like this. Even so, the topic served as a starting point for this simulation project in collaboration with Seungkyun Lee.

First PrototypeWe’ve tried to build more complex relationships between the triangles, like in the previous proposal. Although, they turned out to be too complicated to code and didn’t add much to the main story.
This is the first functional prototype:

Circles:
– avoid circles with the same color — based on a fixed personal boundary, which is the same for all circles
– turn into grey when touched by triangles
– turn back into pink when touched by a pink circle
– bounce

FinalThe arrow shape was a fortunate mistake and we decided to keep it. It made the triangles look more aggressive. We added some graphic forms to emphasize the “alert” and “cure”effects:

Even though the simulation worked well, we weren’t satisfied with the way triangles changes the circle state simply by touching them. While testing different solutions for that, we ended up adding an “avoid after touching circle” behaviour to the triangle. As a side effect, the triangles seemed to “poke” the circles. That happy accident turned out to be an appropriate metaphor.

Post-presentation Conclusion
Interesting how people can see lots of different stories in there. Some may see men giving up on a woman after a “new” one just come in. Or the opposite, a group of men chasing some women and totally ignoring the ones that pass them by.